Mars One Holds Million Martians Meeting with Few Earthlings in Attendance

Mars One, the organization attempting to lead a One Way mission to Mars with the goal of colonization, held what it called the Million Martians Meeting at George Washington University last Saturday. Unfortunately for Mars One and its co-founder and CEO, Bas Lansdorp, few people showed up.
While Mars One has garnered its fair share of press, it lacks the financial resources to actually make its ambitious plan a success. Like the Mars Direct plan championed by Robert Zubrin in the 90’s, and for which he continues to push including at this event, there is no political or financial backing for these types of missions. Until there is either a financial return on investment or a political desire for a manned Mars mission, which would be a return mission, these types of space dreams are but the stuff of science fiction.

NASA and other space agencies do plan on sending humans to Mars but no timetable has been set. At the moment they are continuing with robotic precursor missions.

Entrepreneur and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has also made it known that his ultimate goal is to make humanity a multi-planetary species starting with a manned mission to Mars with the eventual goal of colonizing the “Red Planet”. However even Musk understands the realities of such an endeavour and to that end founded SpaceX. He has been working hard for 10 years to build the company into one which could someday be a part of, or even lead such a mission. However his plan is rooted in developing technology to make it cheaper to access space and has spent hundreds of millions doing so.

And therein lies the difference between dreamers like Mars One and the reality of what Musk and SpaceX are trying to do.